ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
It’s 1899 in the old photo, give or take a year, and Revere Beach is enjoying a fabulous boom. After it was linked to Boston by narrow-gauge railway in 1876, the beach quickly filled with restaurants, dance halls, amusements, cottages, and hotels. The Great Ocean Pier, built in 1881 and more than a quarter-mile long, docked steamships from Boston and offered moonlight dancing in a pavilion at its seaward end. The Pines Hotel, in the same year, was able...

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
It’s 1899 in the old photo, give or take a year, and Revere Beach is enjoying a fabulous boom. After it was linked to Boston by narrow-gauge railway in 1876, the beach quickly filled with restaurants, dance halls, amusements, cottages, and hotels. The Great Ocean Pier, built in 1881 and more than a quarter-mile long, docked steamships from Boston and offered moonlight dancing in a pavilion at its seaward end. The Pines Hotel, in the same year, was able to seat 3,000 in its vast dining room. In 1895, Revere Beach became public when it was acquired by the Metropolitan District Commission. A noted landscape architect, Charles Eliot, created a master plan under which the MDC built the roofed pavilions we see in the photos, as well as a bathhouse with 1,000 dressing rooms and 1000 bicycle stalls. It was connected to the beach

by pedestrian tunnels that ran beneath the railway. Like all the great urban parks, Revere Beach lost much of its popularity with the arrival of the automobile. In recent years, it has revived somewhat under a new master plan by Carol Johnson. The 1994 photo shows a team of volleyball players and, in the background, apartments where hotels once stood. The pavilions remain, however, painstakingly restored by the Boston architectural firm McGinley Hart Associates.